Told through a detailed ruled notebook jottings of a young girl name Karen Rayes, Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing is Monsters Book 1 is a riveting tale of 386 pages. It is, on the one hand, a murder mystery. And an the other, an exploration of love and sexual identity.
Each of the characters in the narrative is well-crafted, and uptown Chicago of the 1960s comes alive through the people in the novel, who inhabited those turbulent times. Karen loves monster movies and horror fanzines with their lurid displays. She imagines herself as a werewolf, which fits perfectly with her gay self – a social outcast or monster.
The mysterious death of Karen’s neighbour Anka Sliverberg, who used to live upstairs from her, and the narrator’s effort to unravel the mystery forms the central part of the story. Several other narratives – of her artist brother Deeze, and of Anka and her mother – are so well linked to the central theme that they become indistinguishable from Karen’s despite keeping their identities intact.
Art attack
Perhaps the only thing coming in the way of reading the story is the inability to take one’s eyes off Anka’s captivating and frightened face on the cover. Such is the power of illustration in this game-changing graphic narrative that the reader’s attention is arrested page after page. The illustrations dictate the reading pace of Emil Ferris’s novel.
My Favorite Thing Is Monsters reinvents graphic storytelling by using unorthodox visual layouts instead of the traditional sequential panels. To create the feel of a notebook, the art is mostly styled like Bic-pen cross-hatching. Karen’s notebook in the novel is filled with her own drawings and re-workings of horror magazine covers.
The design of the novel follows the way Karen might have created the story, in the form of illustrations in a young woman’s notebook. Fantagraphics, the publisher of the novel, should get its share of the credit for this. The imaginative use of colours reflects the mood of the story as they change from multiple shades to pale grey.
The Art Institute of Chicago, where Ferris was trained, features prominently in the story. The exhibits at the Institute, as seen and interpreted by the cartoonist and (possibly her alter ego) Karen, take this novel to a higher level. Through Karen’s sketches of famous works of art, Ferris re-interprets them to represent different aspects of the story.
In these parts of the book, the novel is all but transformed into meta fiction, and the effect is brilliant. One particular example is the cartoonist’s re-interpretation of The Nightmare, a 1781 oil painting by Anglo-Swiss artist Henry Fuseli – it is simply astounding. On another page, Ferris introduces a burning giraffe to remind the reader of Salvador Dali and his 1937 painting The Invention of Monsters. Such gems are to be found all over.
It rarely happens in graphic novels that a work is equally alluring in text and illustrations. In this case, though, the whole novel plays out like a waltz of words and pictures, with Ferris in supreme command. It is a multilayered plot, with characters coming in and then getting lost in the mist, only to reappear to carry the tale forward. It is hard to believe that a debut graphic narrative by a relatively unknown writer-artist can be so mature.
“I have a soft spot for were-people”
Ferris grew up in uptown Chicago, where she still lives in the city. In the 1960s, the place was teeming with extraordinary characters – beats, hillbillies, hippies, immigrants, mobsters, and many more – with crime, doping, civil rights activism, politics and hatred thriving in equal measure. Ferris relives these memories in her work. She spoke to Scroll.in about her book over email.
Is it fair to call My Favorite Thing Is Monsters an “autobiofictionography”, as Lynda Barry calls some of her work?
That’s a great question! Yes, I think that is a fabulous name for it.
It took you a long time to finish the work. When did you realise there was a book in you?
I think that’s the important question for a lot of authors. Truthfully I believe that there is a book inside every single being who has lived. Each one would be utterly different in size and shape, and of course content.
Inherent to the question of whether there is a book within oneself is another question of whether that book is worthy of being told. I believe that if an author succeeds in reflecting with depth and honesty (and that can take any form) on the experience of living, then the story can be gripping.
Of course storytelling is like any other ability. The more we work at it, the better we’ll become. So that part – the craft – is important, but that knowledge should only embolden would-be authors and never dissuade them. Everything is in the doing, and no human creation of which I’m aware is perfect.
Your book is not a conventional graphic narrative. Is this something that you had planned, or it just happened?
Once I decided to tell this story there was certainly a requisite amount of planning. Yet the characters began to live for me, and as they did they began to suggest (sometimes insistently) that they would only do such and so forth.
In the case of Anka, she began telling her story and (for most of her telling) she really refused to climb into boxes to do this. I needed to give her more room, and when I did allow her to sprawl out, she rewarded me with a more nuanced accounting.
You must have answered this question many times before but still…why monsters?
Because I love them. I believe we are all monsters of a type. Hopefully good monsters, but monsters nonetheless.
In her work One Hundred Demons, Lynda Barry talks about “demons” she faced in her life. Are there monsters from your life hiding in your book?
Definitely!
Did you feel at any point after you finished the work that the book may not be published?
Yes. I want to give hope to other people struggling to make art. We live in a world that is hungry for art, but is not always aware enough of that hunger to properly support artists.
So the job of the artist is to be tenaciously dedicated to their work. To complete it no matter what the obstacles may be. Once it is completed, sometimes it takes time to catch on.
I was a child who did not walk until nearly three, but my mother never said, “It’s been a long time and I guess we should give up hope on you walking.” But we artists – who are the parents of our “non-ambulatory creations” – often do give up on them and that is a greater tragedy than the fact that they haven’t yet been able to toddle into the world.
Do you have any favourites among the monsters in the book?
I have a soft spot for were-people and vampires.
One last predictable question: When can we see your next work?
Hopefully (if I take my own advice) Book 2 should be out in October...furry fingers well crossed!
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